This chapter identifies the second kind of epistemic injustice: hermeneutical injustice, wherein someone has a significant area of their social experience obscured from understanding owing to prejudicial flaws in shared resources for social interpretation. Systematic and incidental cases are distinguished. The wrong is analysed in terms of a situated hermeneutical inequality: the prejudicial flaws in shared interpretive resources prevent the subject from making sense of an experience which it is strongly in her interests to render intelligible. Finally, the virtue of hermeneutical justice is analysed — a virtue on the part of the hearer that is such as to mitigate the effects of hermeneutical injustice on the speaker. Like the virtue of testimonial justice, this virtue is a hybrid ethical-intellectual virtue.
Keywords: social interpretation, structural identity prejudice, social construction, virtue of hermeneutical justice